The Future of Decision Making | Shriya Rastogi | TEDxYouth@ESRM

[Applause] i made a decision today a decision to speak at tedx everyone makes thousands of decisions every day they might be as insignificant as deciding which pair of socks one is going to wear or have a little more importance such as deciding a career path but the fact is that decisions are everywhere they're ubiquitous and nowadays we're relying more and more on technologies to help us make these decisions for us for example we want to go to frankfurt city instead of opening up a map looking at the different ways to get there and then deciding upon the fastest route we just type in the destination on google maps and let google maps make that decision for us my name is shira rastogy and today i'm going to be talking about the future of decision making more specifically how ai will help us and influence our decision making in our day-to-day lives so i'm going to outline what a world would look like where ai has taken over our decision making and then leave it up to you the audience to decide whether you would like to adopt this society or not but before i get started i feel like it is really important for me to define what decision making even is decision making is the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or course of idea and the decisions i make might be completely different from the decisions you make because decisions are heavily dependent on the decision makers knowledge beliefs ideas one can say that you are who you are based on the decisions you have made so they're kind of a big deal but they're not that easy to make now are there because there are so many people out there that are trying to manipulate our decision making they're gaining so large financial incentives out of this let's say you're outside a supermarket you see a poster which says by product a product day is amazing it's cheap awesome then when you walk inside the store you're bombarded with all these different possibilities all these different products but you still remember what you have read from that poster about how great product a is and what do you do you buy product a company a has successfully manipulated your decision making skills well this is only a small example let's think big let's think politics politicians are trying to manipulate our decisions so that when we walk inside the voting ballot we vote for them so yeah decision making is difficult as well who here is satisfied with all of the decisions they have made anyone see any hands well i aspire to be like you but for the rest of us we're not so great at making decisions now are we because there are seven steps to effective decision making the first one is to identify the decision second one is to gather information identify alternatives weigh the evidence choose among alternatives and take action us humans generally we're great at steps one to six we can take the action but when it comes upon reviewing and reflecting upon our decisions we often find that the decisions we have made in the past are not so great and that is okay because each day we are armed with so many new facts so many new experiences that our decision making is bound to get better every day and i'm pretty sure most of you guys have heard about this before but why is there so much regret in society why you see psychologists have gone so far as to even coin a fancier word or regret namely post-decision-making dissonance why is there so much post-decision-making dissonance why can't so many people relate with this quote well to name a couple of reasons why us humans we're irrational right we make decisions with our heart and not our brains sometimes we look at the short-term benefits and we don't look at the long-term benefits sometimes we just have so much information bombarded at us nowadays this has become even more complex since we have so much informations right in our pockets and you might ask well information is good for decision making right well yes it is but now you see our brain isn't programmed to process so much information on a daily basis and also as i mentioned before there are people out there that are trying to manipulate our decision making so when we read something on the internet let's say a blog about how great product a is does the blogger genuinely think product a is good or is company a paying the blogger so that the blogger could write great stuff about product a we don't know and no wonder there is so much regret no wonder we are confused we are frustrated nowadays because of all this misinformation floating around i can't blame you i'm not great at decision making myself but naturally us humans we have created a demand a demand for a product that can help us may help us in our decision-making process and as my economics teacher likes to say when there's a demand a supply is quick to follow well except in the case of the coronavirus vaccine but that is a different ted talk now is it [Music] so as i speak today neuroscientists are developing a kind of decision-making machine a machine which can make decisions even better than the human you might ask how does that even work whenever when most of us think of our brain they think of this mystical ball of magic but what they don't see is that that our brain works just like a machine through our brain through biochemical algorithms and information knowledge is stored inside these little synaptic weights and the second neuroscientists figure out a way to convert these biochemical algorithms into numerical algorithms they have essentially captured all the great things our brain can do in a usb stick a program called the brain but it would just be better because it would also have access to all of this information it would be able to filter out all the fake information from the real one who wouldn't want that now but some of you guys might still not be convinced you might say well humans have this thing an intuition and this cannot be replicated by any program well as professor brian d ripley asserted human intuition is the consequence of trial and error so when you might have this gut feeling about something it is usually based on some past experience of yours and if the brain would have all the experiences of a human stored then it would logically also have a human intuition just like us so this machine could make better decisions than us and if someone came up to your door and said look here is a usb stick i know you're not great at making decisions but this usb stick can answer all of your doubts clear all of your uncertainties would you buy it i mean i would because i'm really not that great at making decisions but what would happen if these decision makers actually took over our society what if these decision makers were would be launched inside the market will this be our future who would be entitled to rational decisions would only the rich be entitled to these decision-making devices what would happen to democracy you see the mastermind behind this decision maker could manipulate us in one second because we would all just be so dependent on this device our entire socioeconomic infrastructure is based on the assumption that humans can make their own decisions and once that assumption is proven to be false if we give our decision making to a program a device then the entire infrastructure that we've built will just collapse but obviously these are just speculations what we can reliably conclude is that our brain development will sink we will obviously make more data-driven decisions whether they will be ethical as something we also do not know and yeah we will just be very very reliant on this decision-making device and you might now ask okay if let these decision makers take take over the world right it's just another revolution no it's not you see this revolution will be like no other in the industrial revolution machines were able to outdo humans in physical tasks and yes a lot of people were jobless but this then sparked the digital revolution and look where we are now you know but now human capabilities and technological capabilities are neck to neck and if these decision makers are launched inside the market then technology will overpower humans it will not only be physically stronger than us it will also be smarter than this and that poses a significant problem for us right what will there be left for us to do we will just be redundant right with nothing left to do because we won't even have time to think we won't we won't even be able to think because this decision maker would be making all our decisions for us and this sounds pretty scary but this is not even my main concern my main concern is that irrationality leads to innovation sometimes the mistakes you make you learn from these mistakes and this sparks some great interest this motivates you to make yourselves better this these mistakes are what put these mistakes are the the ones that push you forward if steve jobs had a decision maker and he would have asked should i launch apple the decision maker would have said no the financial risks are too high and if steve jobs hadn't taken this irrational decision why would i be even up here giving this ted talk now irrationality leads to innovation and now some of you guys might be completely terrified and honestly i was as well but then i realized that there is a way to stop this the whole reason why decision makers would be in the market is because we have created demand for them so the only way to stop societal destruction the collapse of everything we've built is to eradicate the demand we have created we have to learn to be satisfied with the decisions we make we have to learn that the decisions we make are not set in stone and we obviously have to assess the situation we're in and analyze information given and yes this sounds easier said than done but we have to appreciate our decision-making gift you see right now we're in a society where we all want to reach the most idealistic version of ourselves and what we're not realizing is that in order to reach this super idealistic version of ourselves we're ready to give us to give up the most important weapon we have the weapon of decision making this is what sets us apart from all of the animals everyone this is what has brought us so far today this is why i'm standing on the stage we are ready to become the slaves of the very thing we have created technology and for what so that we can be manipulated easily or that our brain development will sink and we will just be redundant creatures in society what's the point we need to learn to think of decision making as a gift and not a burden so when you guys walk out of this great event today i would like you to think i would like you to think about how you think and appreciate the gift that has been bestowed upon humanity the gift of decision making and i certainly am super grateful for speaking here at tedx today and i think i made the right decision for this thank you for having me

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,291

Rating: 4.9652176 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, AI, Decision making

Id: yTr8qkr1F1M

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020